Hollman Morris, labeled 'terrorist,' finally Harvard-bound

For a month, U.S.
officials in Bogotá told Colombian journalist Hollman Morris that his request for a U.S.
visa to study at Harvard as a prestigious Nieman
Fellow had been denied on grounds relating to terrorist activities as
defined by the U.S. Patriot Act, and that the decision was permanent and that there were no grounds for appeal. It was the first time in the storied history
of the Nieman
Foundation that a journalist had been prohibited from traveling not by his
own nation, such as, say, South Africa’s apartheid regime back in 1960, but by
ours,noted
Nieman Curator Bob Giles in the Los Angeles Times.

Morris wrote this
afternoon in an e-mail to the above groups: “I just got out of the U.S. Embassy
and they gave me the visa.” He went on: “I am very happy, and I know none of
this would have been possible without you.”

CPJ and other groups
are happy, too. Although the month-long denial of the visa raises questions that
remain unanswered. Such as: Did U.S.
officials accept information provided by their Colombian counterparts without
independently verifying the claims? Did U.S.
officials follow Colombia’s
lead by (albeit temporarily) red-baiting one of Colombia’s most respected and
critical journalists?

After news of the U.S. visa denial broke in Colombia, more than a few callers on radio and
television talks threatened Morris’ life saying the U.S. decision was confirmation of
his alleged “terrorist” ties.

This is a charge has
been levied against Morris before, by Colombian officials as high-ranking as
President Alvaro Uribe, who has accused
Morris of being “an accomplice of terrorism” over his reporting of the
Colombia’s leftist guerrillas. But human
rights groups suspect that senior Colombian officials have really lashed out
at Morris over his
reports on rightist paramilitary forces linked to senior Colombian
government officials. At the same time, Morris was one of the Colombian
journalists who was spied on and had phone calls and e-mails
intercepted by Colombia’s
Department of Administrative Security under the Uribe administration.

Morris has
frequently visited the United
States, including in 2007 when he received
the Human
Rights Defender Award from Human Rights Watch. Morris’ Nieman Fellowship at
Harvard starts in the fall.